Drive-thru daiquiri stands are as much a part of southern Louisiana culinary culture as crawfish boils and king cakes. Yet they didn’t just appear.
In 1980 a small store in Reston, Louisiana, called Wilmart sold frozen flavored alcoholic drinks they called Frostys. For customers, getting the drinks was woefully inefficient—what with having to park and go inside and wait in line. A Louisiana Tech college student named David Ervin was studying business when he had a “eureka moment.”
Why not offer frozen drinks at a drive-thru? In a parking lot, he took chalk and sketched out a layout for a hypothetical shop where he could serve drinks swiftly. He bought lots of strawberries and every can of Coco López cream of coconut within miles and experimented with drink recipes, all of which he called “daiquiris.” With a $20,000 start-up loan, he bought frozen drink machines, leased a lot on the outskirts of Lafayette, and ordered a prefab building. “Everybody told me I was an idiot,” he says.
Courtesy of David Ervin
Courtesy of David Ervin
Then came the legalities—since no one had done anything like this, there were no regulations on the books. The city of Lafayette sought to shut him down from the beginning. In one citation, the city said he violated the open container law prohibiting open drinks in vehicles. Amid some media fanfare, Ervin announced he had invented a sealed container: A piece of non-resealable freezer tape that covered the hole in the plastic lid where the straw went in. He unveiled the innovation to news outlets, and prevailed in court.
Drive-thru daiquiri shops attracted the attention of not just the local law enforcement, but also groups opposed to irresponsible drinking. This includes Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which was founded the same year Ervin came up with his idea. Perhaps surprisingly, even though Louisiana adopts a fairly laissez-faire approach to alcohol, it’s not an outlier when it comes to drunk driving—24 states have higher drunk driving fatality rates than Louisiana, including almost all of New England.
Ervin’s original drive-thru daiquiri shop closed in the late 1980s, a victim of the oil bust in an oil-dependent city, and the site is now a strip mall. But the concept—and legal precedents—have lived on. Dozens of drive-thru daiquiri stands are still found throughout the region, and Ervin, now a food technologist, still owns one in the New Orleans suburbs.
Bon Appétit spoke with him about how he built the Daiquiri Factory from the ground up, his memories of those early days flouting the law, and ultimately, building a lasting legacy.
It all started in college when I encountered a group of girls holding Styrofoam cups filled with frozen alcoholic drinks. They told me the drinks came from Wilmart, a liquor and convenience store on the outskirts of town. I thought these must have been made in a blender, but the girls said,